Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Most gut instinct thoughts of this can think of 8-9 good reasons to not have faith in Sony's ability to do this.

But this gut instinct thought Facebook would be gone years ago, that the Wii would fail in the previous console generation and that Microsoft Office would have been made irrelevant years ago.

Sony has plenty of experience and desire to succeed in this area and is good at hardware and programming specs --- and this is exactly the kind of technology they could probably "get right" and have plenty of motivation to want to do it.

It is very questionable though whether the ps4 has the horsepower to run such a device. The choices to use such low end CPU and mid range graphics card make me highly doubtful they could produce such a headset without it being incredibly expensive due to the requirements to add processing capabilities to the device. ps4 struggles with 1080p to a TV, some games like Killzone don't even run at 1080p due to it not being powerful enough to handle it and that is supposedly one of their premium flagship games.

I am not sure what more processing capability would be required, though.

Presumably (and this might be nonsense since I have never used the system), they already determine what sound goes into each channel based on the location and orientation of the view of the player (this is old-hat OpenAL stuff). Determining the orientation is done via the analog input of the controller so really they just need to convert the gyroscope data of the headset into the orientation language used by their input system. Other than that, it should just be a matter of running the video and audio to the headset, as opposed to the TV.

The hard part with this is typically just in building the hardware light enough that it doesn't cause neck strain in the user.

If they are trying to build stereoscopic 1080p, then you have the difficulty of rendering the scene twice (well, 2x over the normal number of render passes) and then reading out from 2 framebuffers. That is mostly a question of memory bandwidth in the GPU, though, and how their display controllers arbitrate the bus.

that is the point though. their GPU/CPU combination doesn't have the raw horsepower for a single 1080p screen without making sacrifices somewhere. How are they supposed to run 2x1080p screens while also performing the processing required for the VR and for the game. something has to be sacrificed somewhere, either framerate, resolution or what you can actually do computationally within a game or they need more external processing capacity. I will be interesting to see what choices they have made.

What is "processing required for the VR"? Beyond the question of whether or not they need to render a second frame for the other eye (or if they are just going to show the one scene to both eyes), what else is required?

The big question seems to be whether or not the device will be light enough and whether or not they can build it economically.

The most peculiar thing which comes to my mind is why they want 1080 at such a proximity that the eye is unlikely to see such high resolution.

If they are trying to build stereoscopic 1080p, then you have the difficulty of rendering the scene twice (well, 2x over the normal number of render passes) and then reading out from 2 framebuffers. That is mostly a question of memory bandwidth in the GPU, though, and how their display controllers arbitrate the bus.

How is rendering the scene twice mostly a question of memory bandwidth? Increasing the memory bandwidth alone generally won't do much to increase your ability to render the scene, the limitation here is primarily the amount of ALUs on the GPU not memory bandwidth.

On one level, it depends on their memory topology (how many components are fighting over that particular memory bus - this _should_ be pretty good in a game console).

In general, rendering a large scene takes immense memory bandwidth as the data required to describe the scene (GL commands, texture data, other data for shaders, etc) and the representation of the output (framebuffer, other pixel buffers, etc) are very large.

Then again, my main background in this area is working with compositors (where bandwidt

In general, rendering a large scene takes immense memory bandwidth as the data required to describe the scene (GL commands, texture data, other data for shaders, etc) and the representation of the output (framebuffer, other pixel buffers, etc) are very large.

You should have pretty much all of that uploaded to the GPU anyway, you aren't going to go and do it all again just to render the second frame of the same scene.

I know this is possible with other devices as well, but I can stream 1080p content directly from my computer to my iPad and given that the total bitrate doesn't exceed my network capacity, there is no re-encoding.

To simplify it for you try playing a 1080p file on your computer of your hardrive and then take that same file and stream it from another room and tell me what happens.

WTF? you have no clue what you are talking about. the images are not streamed to the console in multi player, just co-ordinates and basic user actions which are then all rendered LOCALLY. why multi player is harder is that the information is far more unpredictable and requires good CPU and GPU to be able to adequately keep up with the constant calculations, when your CPU or GPU isn't powerful enough (which is the case for ps4) then you need to start either using rendering tricks to avoid the tearing and jag

It's 2x as powerful as the nearest console competitor and faster than any single-GPU gaming rig that's more than a year old. Dollar for dollar it outperforms everything.

Care to put the PS4 up against my computer with it's single overclocked GTX 680. I'll eat my hat if a PS4 gets better framerates than I do on the same resolution and graphics settings and my computer has to deal with the bloat that is M$ windows, a TS server, and a web server running in the background.

I won't argue with the dollar vs dollar argument though. For what I paid to build my watercooled monster of a computer in 2012 I could have bought 3

if they can get 1080p per eye and 90 degrees then I'm buying this the second it goes into the shop. and buy a ps4 to use it with too.

and sony has plenty of experience with head mounted displays, but the previous consumer display was for viewing movies(and did not have a high fov, the hmz).

but heck, ANYBODY who creates oculus rift style display with about same fov as rift and 1080p per eye gets my money(as long as it's under a thousand bucks. maybe even 1.5). it's just so fucking cool(I got the dev oculu

My first thought seems to be opposite of most of the people I've seen post on this. Everyone keeps pointing out that it would be hard for the PS4 to be able to produce the desired effect due to the technical specifications of the console. I haven't been following the PS* close enough to comment on this, but I have been checking in on the VR headset scene on and off for quite some time. The technologies have been coming for years and years, and many gaming rigs have multiple-monitor capability (for stereosco

aye, strap a brick to your head where it hangs out 4-6 inches from your face and rests on the bridge of your nose, if that doesnt get you the eye strain of faked streoscopic vision and the refresh rate will

Aye, strap a patch to your head where your eye previously hung out 4-6 inches from your face and rested on the bridge of your nose, if that doesnt get you the eye strain of faked streoscopic vision and the refresh rate will. Arrr matey.

what counterweight, the current incarnation has a open back, seems like the whole idea of a counterweight falls flat when there is no counterside to the weight, and none ever made or currently being presented have a counterweight.

sorry if I am pointing out the obvious, but I am not the one designing and trying to sell the things

The Oculus guys did their research and found that all of this is required for a good experience. The PS4 hardware can't come close to meeting any of those requirements and their headset is going to be a terrible experience and just make people think all VR headsets are terrible.

Some big management guys at Sony are pushing for a VR Headset because it is going to be the next big thing, but they don't understand any of the technical details and it is just going to fail.

(Am I the only person who on seeing this thought "Hrm, a potentially cheaper than all the others VR headset, how will I be able to hack this for PC use etc.?")

Also, those whining that the PS4 doesn't have enough horsepower to run it are clearly dumber than pond scum, the PS3 had enough horsepower to do it. You may need a little less detail, explosions/reflections etc. might be a tad less rea

(Am I the only person who on seeing this thought "Hrm, a potentially cheaper than all the others VR headset, how will I be able to hack this for PC use etc.?")

You think Sony is going to release a product that is cheaper than the competition? Good luck with that.

Also, those whining that the PS4 doesn't have enough horsepower to run it are clearly dumber than pond scum, the PS3 had enough horsepower to do it. You may need a little less detail, explosions/reflections etc. might be a tad less realistic but do

If Sony cared about low price, wouldn't they just make the PS4 Oculus compatible? Seems pretty clear their headset is targeting a premium price for the specs.
Will it support the current Killzone? No, because the devs didn't want to reduce the experience for users who don't own an optional headset. At least with PC you can just play top-of-the-line VR games on a lower-end machine if you don't want to pay for a headset. Imo optional VR is actually a disadvantage for the equality feature of consoles. I

My understanding is that some people are inherently susceptible to VR sickness no matter how high the framerate or resolution that the display is at. Combine that with the people who will be sick and disoriented by the movement controls, and it's pretty clear that VR simply isn't for everyone. But there is, and will be, a market for it. Hell, there was a market for the Virtual Boy. And that thing was a complete headache-inducing piece of shit.

May it be that PS3 and 360 is 30 FPS and current gen more often 60 FPS and as you say more often around 1080p for the PS4 and less for the Xbox One.

As far as performance go I know a lot of people say that the design choices have limited performance and hence they can't get there wherever there it but the thing is that since they are designed as they are they can also take advantage of future evolution of the hardware s

They would be smart to make the VR games entirely separate by requiring the VR, and not displaying to the TV (except some little "preview" window so it will be less weird for onlookers). The rendering horsepower required for 3d is part of it, but beyond that VR games will also need to be different in other ways, such as head/viewer motion allowed, reliance on depth perception, field of view, and certainly other stuff that I can't think of ahead of time, some of which will be particular to Sony's implementa

You're talking complete shit. Most PS4 games come in at 1080p, most games run at 30FPS because that's the target for TV, and the FOV in a game is just a float variable so why would you think that was even relevant?

The Oculus Rift guys have a project to produce a VR headset, and so does Sony. They are all capable of doing research, and none of the suits at either company understand the technical details, so why would you think that was relevant either?

It's a property of the sensor, not the console. The post he's replying to argued that because console games run with a narrow FOV (an optimisation for a large but distant monitor) they couldn't possibly drive a wide-field-of-view output device. Which is just wrong.

This is actually a product of Sony's research labs, not "some big management guys", and as they outlined at the actual event, the prototype does something over a 90-degree FOV (105 is entirely possible) with 1080p resolution. The finished version will be somewhat better. Framerate will be decided by the software, not the hardware; you could write a PS4 game that ran at 120fps in 1080p quite easily if you weren't trying to make pretty screenshots with lots of pixel shaders, and the relatively low angular res

It doesn't have to be better than Oculous Rift to succeed, and you know it. Oculous Rift succeeding will likely bring Sony's headset up with it, being the best option for the entire console market... assuming MS don't have a brilliant plan up their sleeves.

The advantage that this has over the Oculus Rift is that, by the time it ships, it will work on a "plug in and play" basis with a mass-market games console which may quite reasonably have an installed base of 20 million+ by then. Sony basically "won" the BD vs HD-DVD battle by turning every PS3 into a BD player - this has some potential (though as I'll come onto, it's not guaranteed) to manage a similar victory over the Oculus Rift.

The big problem, of course, is that optional peripherals for consoles have a

So off the bat the sony vr headset is lowered spec than the oculus dev kits. 90 degrees versus 110 degrees field of view. They are running at 1080p but so does some oculus prototypes. I would not be surprised if they were slower than the oculus as well. So it comes down to price and software. Also very interested in the demo tommorow. Hopefully someone with a dev kit can try one tell us how they compare.

The PS4 only just came out, and it easily outperforms a $2,000 PC from 4 years ago, and most $1,000 PCs from last year. If you think the average gaming PC is higher spec than the PS4, you're an idiot. It's also twice as efficient as a PC, since it runs FreeBSD with the GPU mapped directly into userspace, instead of the Windows driver stack and the crappy Windows thread scheduler. It can easily cope with 1080p at 60Hz. Meanwhile the Rift is only using 120Hz as a hack because they can't figure out how to

A PC from 4 years ago at that price would be a top end i7 with a 5870 or better in it hmmmm I don't think a ps4 is going to outperform that. It is going to be similar on graphics but way behind on processor. If you have to resort to comparing to 4 year old tech and still fall short I think that is pretty fair justification to say the ps4 was outdated from the day it was released.

First is the obvious thing to note, Sony's solution is PS4-only, while the Rift will (at least initially) be PC-only. So they're not directly competing in that respect. But more importantly is that for developers, Sony's solution and Oculus' solution pose all the same problems. You need to figure out input, locomotion, figure out the rules of VR (what feels good and what doesn't), figure out what sort of gameplay works best...

The more developers there are working on VR content, the better the entire VR ecos

180 degrees horizontal would be behind you. I think by 90 degrees horizontal they mean to the right/left of your eye. Oculus is going for over 100 degrees because you can rotate your eyes left/right which enables you to see slightly beyond 90 degrees to your side.

Just doing a test, my eyes can see about 140 degrees horizontal if I turn my eyes so neither device gets true full vision

So much ignorance needs to be addressed.
First...Performance:
The PS4 can display 1080p content at CONSISTENT high frame rates (60+) just fine. All the developers have to do is dial down things like shadows, physics, particle effects, or the polygon count. There are LOTS of factors that go into what your end results are, graphically. The reason the launch games perform the way they do is that developers are trying to push the hardware...dial back the fancy "whiz bang" effects a bit, and you will get bet

and yet their star games had to sacrifise resolution and framerate in order to run on the ps4

No, they didn't have to. The fact is, no matter how powerful the console, you can always chuck in more effects and more realistic asplosions by reducing the framerate and resolution to a (debatably) acceptable minimum.

This is the decision of game designers who choose effects over framerate. The PS4 is perfectly capable of delivering 1080p at 60fps, or 2160p at 120fps*, subject to a reduced graphics budget, but none of them seem to want to go that way these days.

*by which I mean, it could calculate the values of 8.2 million pixels 120 times a second - other technical qualifications notwithstanding

VR gives you a low angular resolution because your "screen" is spread over a wider field, which lets you get away with that reduced graphics budget. So a fringe benefit of VR might be games with a mode that gives you fewer shinies but a consistent, high framerate for a change.

It's a quote from The Matrix. The name 'Morpheus' should have clued in the idiots that modded this down.

Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?[Takes a bite of steak]Cypher: Ignorance is bliss.